


a big deal in the resistance

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: and my name is anakin [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Female Knights of Ren, Finn is a Skywalker (Star Wars), Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Force Ghost(s), Force-Sensitive Finn (Star Wars), Force-Sensitive Leia Organa, Grief/Mourning, Knights of Ren - Freeform, Names, Stormtrooper Culture, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:07:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24024802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: And he’s nine years old and he isn’t allowed to have a name any more. He’s FN-2187 and he’s top of all his classes. He marches in line and he eats in the mess hall, he keeps his thoughts in order and if his dreams are strange then he knows not to say anything.You’re a person and your name is Anakin!FN-2187’s mastery of himself is not perfect, but it’s getting there.
Relationships: Chewbacca & Finn & Han Solo, Finn & Anakin Skywalker, Finn & Ben Solo, Finn & Leia Organa, Finn & Rey, Leia Organa/Han Solo, Luke Skywalker/Sana Starros, Poe Dameron & Finn
Series: and my name is anakin [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1773232
Comments: 49
Kudos: 326





	a big deal in the resistance

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to jackofauster and cosmonauthill for looking at this for me!

**viii.**

All the best stories start in the middle.

On board the _Finalizer_ , an officer approaches the Master of the Knights of Ren and stands at parade rest, trembling visibly. Kylo Ren sways like a corpse on a gibbet, dark and malevolent, and then he says: "Well?"

"Sir," says Lieutenant Mitaka, forcing himself to keep his eyes open, gaze front. "We were unable to acquire the droid on Jakku. It escaped capture aboard a stolen Corellian YT model freighter."

Ren stills, and somehow that's worse. "The droid... stole a freighter?"

Lieutenant Mitaka swallows convulsively. They say, the veterans of the Empire who make up the backbone of the First Order, that Vader used to give one chance, sometimes. Kylo Ren isn't that merciful: Mitaka has seen it for himself. "Not exactly, sir. It had help."

Ren's silence requires an answer. 

"A local scavenger girl, and a stormtrooper who - turned traitor. But there's no sign of the pi -"

Mitaka's voice cuts off in a choked gasp too strangled for a scream, as his feet lift from the floor and his body is hauled across the room to rest before Ren's clenched fist, his toes scrabbling uselessly for the ground.

" _Which stormtrooper_?" 

All the best stories start in the middle. But they don't begin there.

**i.**

And twenty years before, in a clinic room on Yavin IV, this story squeezes its tiny eyes and its tiny fists closed and nestles blindly against its mother’s chest, and its father crashes into the room, wild-eyed and sweating.

“You’re late,” the story’s mother announces, grinning like a woman who will never let this go.

“Sana!”

Sana laughs, even though it hurts. “All the excitement happened before you got here, farmboy.” She hitches her baby a little higher on her chest. “Come on. Meet your kid. He doesn’t look anything like you.”

“If he looks like you,” Luke says, with conviction, “he’s perfect.” He throws himself down into the visitor’s chair, and touches his infant son’s head with wondering fingertips. “I had a hell of a time finding you.”

“You’ll excuse me for not checking in under my own name.” They share a quick flicker of a glance. Ben Organa’s birth was headline news in half the galaxy by the time he was crowning; the other half, Leia had pre-emptively sued. “I had to fill out a birth certificate, though, so someone’ll figure it out soon. Break us out of here, Jedi.”

“What did you go with?” Luke kisses her cheek, and then the tip of his son’s nose. 

“Anakin Starros,” Sana says, and watches Luke freeze. “I know Anakin was your favourite of the names. And I wasn’t saddling him with Anakin Skywalker. The galaxy has done that once.”

“I like it,” Luke says, softly. “I love it.” He shifts onto the bed instead of the chair when Sana moves over, curls against her, his arm under hers where it cradles their child.

Anakin Starros, fifteen hours old, doesn’t scream.

**ii.**

And he’s loved, is Anakin, there’s a mother, and a father, an aunt who reads him legislation like a bedtime story, an uncle who calls him _little man_ , and another that howls at him in the soft, muted tones of a Wookiee lullaby, an aunt-by-love that sits him in the cockpit of an X-wing and makes vroom vroom noises, _Red Five, standing by_ , a cousin who hovers over him like some kind of lanky, protective crow, a hundred friends of the family, a hundred loving pairs of hands to toddle to and from -

He’s loved, he’s loved, he’s loved.

**iii.**

And in a ship on its way to the Lostar sector, Anakin screams himself hoarse, because there’s a body on the floor in front of him that’s bleeding and thrashing and choking horrible tortured shrieks, because it’s not quite dead. Tamé stares at the body, who was one of her fellow students - fellow traitors - fellow knights, and who now seems like just another dead man, and cuts his head off, which stops the noise.

Well, it stops some of the noise.

She turns off her lightsaber, and picks up Anakin, cradles him against her shoulder and hums to him. He’s not much more than a baby, she thinks. She doesn’t know why her lord insisted on bringing him.

Yes, she does. Tamé clutches the child close, feels him cling to her neck. Anakin is six years old and defenceless. He doesn’t even seem to use the Force instinctively, the way her lord is said to have done at the same age.

“Tamé,” says Lord Ren. His voice cracks on his newfound authority. “What happened here?”  
  
“He was tormenting your cousin,” Tamé says, without looking round. “To make him use the Force.”

The man Skywalker always said that his son’s abilities were deeply buried, hidden, for all his strength in the Force was visible to anyone who looked. It was always hard to find Anakin, when he didn’t want to be found.

“What will Lord Snoke do with him, my lord?” Tamé says.

Lord Ren grips the back of her neck just too tight, a silent reminder not to ask too many questions, and she stops breathing.

“I’ll hide him,” he says, in a deep crackle. “I’ll hide him, till he shows himself. And then he’ll be my apprentice.”

There are only ever two. Tamé knows that.

“Our secret,” Lord Ren adds.

Tamé closes her eyes. Lord Ren will not hurt his cousin. What Lord Snoke might do -

Tamé is an adult: she can bear a life of power earned through pain. She chose that when she swore her oath to Lord Ren. But Anakin is only six years old.

She breathes out. The grip on the back of her neck loosens.

“Our secret,” she whispers.

She lets Lord Ren take the child from her. Of all the older students at the temple, Anakin always liked him best. 

In Lord Ren’s arms, Anakin quiets. And Tamé never sees him again.

**iv.**

And he’s nine years old and he isn’t allowed to have a name any more. He’s FN-2187 and he’s top of all his classes. He marches in line and he eats in the mess hall, he keeps his thoughts in order and if his dreams are strange then he knows not to say anything.

_You’re a person and your name is Anakin!_

FN-2187’s mastery of himself is not perfect, but it’s getting there. 

**v.**

And at the village called Tuanul he’s nineteen, and Slip’s nineteen, too - forever nineteen, as his bloodied hand slides down FN-2187’s visor, and his body falls limp inside his armour, so that it’s no longer a body, just a corpse. FN-2187 breathes in uneven gasps and shudders; his blaster lifts and then it falls, unfired. Kylo Ren looks him directly in the eye and he feels his spine jolt like it’s been yanked, he steps into a cargo bay and he rips his helmet off and stares unseeing into the darkness as the cold sweat runs down his face.

“FN-2187. Turn in your blaster for inspection.”

“Yes, captain,” FN-2187 says, in a voice which doesn’t feel like his own.

“And who gave you permission to remove that helmet?”

He jams his helmet back on. FN-2187’s sense of self-preservation is second to none, but permission is a word that no longer feels real.

A lot of things no longer feel real.

**vi**

And when he drags the Resistance pilot into a cleaning cupboard, FN-2187 still no longer feels like anything is real. But the pilot clearly has it figured out, because when FN-2187 says _it’s the right thing to do_ , the pilot grins at him with blood in his teeth and gold in his eyes, and says - _you need a pilot_.

_I need a pilot_ , says FN-2187.

And then they actually get away, which doesn’t feel real either, and he shoots down a TIE fighter, which is ridiculous, and the pilot Poe names him Finn, and it’s all too good to be true until the TIE fighter melts into the quicksand with a fountain of debris, leaving Finn with nothing but a leather jacket, caught on an instrument panel, now caught in his hand.

Reality tastes like dehydration.

**viii.**

And meeting Rey is like - Finn has no benchmark for what meeting Rey is like, unless her wild cheering when he takes out their pursuit with the _Millennium Falcon_ ’s decrepit guns is the same as the gold in Poe’s eye was, when he caught Finn out in a lie.

Finn hopes she does not also end up in a well of quicksand. He wants to hold on tight to this quicksilver feeling. He wants to know it for what it is.

**x.**

And then, about the same time as Kylo Ren is slashing a wall on Starkiller Base to molten slag, Finn is pulling Han Solo over to one side and hissing “Hey, just so you know, I’m kind of a big deal in the Resistance, so -”

Han Solo stares at him so strangely that he stops mid-sentence. 

“Yeah, kid,” Han Solo says, slowly. “I can believe that. You might be.” He pauses. “How old are you?”

“Nineteen cycles. What the -”

The crease between Han Solo’s eyebrows deepens forbiddingly. “What’s your name?”

“Finn,” Finn says. “I already told you that.”

“Huh,” Han Solo says, almost to himself. “You sure?”

  
  
“Of course I’m sure,” Finn snaps, aggrieved. “It’s _my_ name.”

And then there’s the whole thing with the Kanjiklub, the Guavian Death Gang, and a bunch of rathtars. Which sort of puts an end to that conversation. 

**ix.**

Finn is not a huge fan of Maz Kanata and the way she crawls across a table to stare into his face. Stormtroopers are not issued personal space along with their armour, he’s had half a platoon in his business at all times since the day he could march, but there’s something too hard about the way she’s looking at him.

If you live long enough, Maz says, you see the same eyes in different people, and also (unflatteringly) that Finn has the eyes of a man who wants to run.

Finn says he’s just looking for a job, thanks, and to get out of here.

Han says not to be in such a hurry, kid, he can stick around and get some experience, learn his way around the galaxy, how not to get swindled. Han’ll pay a fair wage - him and Rey both.

Finn says he’ll think about it.

He’s looking for somewhere to piss when he hears a little boy screaming, and follows the noise down a path of narrow stone steps into the worst hallucinations he’s ever had. A boy howling in the arms of a bloodied young woman, a dead body in pieces on the floor. A corridor on Starkiller. The last beams of a burning building, collapsing in on itself, and a metal hand on the dome of an old-style astromech. The massed ranks of the Knights of Ren, bringing with them the same cold terror that haunts the nape of Finn’s neck whenever they’re on-base. A forest, in a strange nightmare half-light, the snap and hiss of a lightsaber, and faintly underlaying it all, that screaming.

_I’m a person and my name is Anakin_! cries a different boy, and as Finn shuts his eyes and breathes in dry desert air he hears the echo of a man’s voice: _you’re a person, and your name is Anakin!  
  
_

_My designation is FN-2187_ , some old instinct replies, but that isn’t true, not any more.

_These are your first steps_ , whispers an old, wise voice, and Finn opens his eyes not to a desert nor to a snowy forest nor (thank fuck) the Knights of Ren, but to a storage room. And he’s holding a lightsaber that definitely isn’t his.

“Uh, I’m sorry,” he says to Maz, who’s standing behind him. “I’ll put it back.”

“No,” Maz says, and presses it into his hands instead. “It belongs to you. It was Luke Skywalker’s, and before him, it was his father’s. And now it is calling to you.”

“I really don’t think I should answer,” Finn replies, backing away, and then his head jerks up as he hears the faint edge of approaching TIE fighters. 

“Your friend needs you!” Maz says. “She got upset and ran into the jungle. The droid went with her. Kylo Ren wants the droid, but he’ll settle for the girl. He knows she is as strong in the Force as you are. Find her! Defend her! We cannot lose another Jedi.” 

“Her name is Rey,” Finn corrects automatically, skipping past the bits that don’t make sense. “I don’t have a weapon!”

“You have a weapon!” Maz wraps his fingers around the lightsaber. “Use it!” 

But Ren takes Rey anyway, and the troopers have Finn with his hands on his head and the lightsaber on the floor, and a bastard of a sergeant Finn doesn’t recognise says that Lord Ren wants to see this one, _personally_. 

Traitors and cowards always get their due.

**x.**

Except then there’s one hell of a pilot. So maybe not today, suckers.

**xi.**

Leia Organa is half the size of Captain Phasma and twice as frightening, and she looks at Finn in that same strange way that Han Solo did. She praises him for defecting, which puzzles Finn; he can’t even pretend that it wasn’t half an accident. He ran away from the First Order, but Maz was right: he’s not running to anywhere. General Organa asks him questions about his family, and seems confused when he says he has none, but she lets it go. 

She asks if he wants his geneprint checked, Major Kalonia can do it easily as part of a straightforward check-up, she’s already here to look over Chewbacca and Finn is much less trouble than a recalcitrant Wookiee, but - stormtroopers don’t come from the kind of families that can afford geneprints. What would be the point?

“You never know,” General Organa says. “No, trust me, you never know.” 

Han huffs like this is an in-joke, and General Organa pulls a sour face at him as she pats Finn affectionately on the shoulder and asks him when he last ate. By the time he’s finished his answer someone is already demanding her attention for the attack on Starkiller Base, but still she nods at a small and pointy aide with fair hair and sends her running for food. 

**xii.**

Finn finds Poe Dameron mostly by accident, and maybe he should feel bad that the first words out of his mouth that aren’t about Poe being alive are about how he needs to find Rey. But Poe seems to understand, gets him back into the thick of the briefing where he needs to go, and he even lets Finn keep his jacket. Which is good, because Finn would have given it back if he had to, but he doesn’t want to. He likes it. Feels good.

Finn doesn’t feel bad at all about lying, if it gets him even a millimetre closer to finding Rey. 

**xiii.**

Starkiller is just as miserably fucking cold as ever, and Han hisses and fulminates all the way down towards the prisoner bays because Finn worked in sanitation, rather than being a ballistics engineer. 

He should be grateful. None of those guys could find their way out of a paper bag unaided. Finn, at least, knows where he’s going. 

He’ll figure it out. He just has to find Rey. He’ll use the Force.

“Maybe it works like that for you,” Han seethes, and is cut off by a particularly emphatic howl from Chewbacca, who has forgiven Finn for his first aid.

Finn tosses Phasma into a garbage chute. Rey breaks herself out of jail, and seems none the worse for going ten rounds with Kylo Ren, somehow - just sweaty and annoyed, and heartbreakingly surprised to see Finn. Han suggests they take the time to help the Resistance fleet blow up the oscillator, and well, it’s what they’re here for -

They are not here for unplanned father-son reunions, but that happens, too. Except that Finn knows, a second before it happens, what Ren’s going to do, and - he screams, wordless, from the bottom of his chest, and somehow, a hundred feet below, Ren hears and reacts, and Han turns, and Ren meets Finn’s eyes directly.

The lightsaber slices and burns Han’s stomach, but it doesn’t cut through his torso. He gasps and falls to his knees, but Chewbacca’s aim is true and Han’s self-preservation instincts are not so bad themselves. He’s on his feet and limping speedily away while Kylo Ren is still wallowing on the floor of the walkway, bleeding into the abyss, staring up at the space where Finn’s head was.

Finn is outside, long gone, running with Rey, hand in hand. 

**xiv.**

“That belongs to me,” Ren snaps, holding out his hand for the lightsaber that flew to Finn’s. “I am the older. Give it to me!”

Finn has an unconscious friend on the floor, and a weapon of legends in his hand, and a fight to the death in front of him. He has gone beyond intimidation, flying, past the stratosphere and into the stars, and he won’t fall to earth just yet.

He lifts Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber. “Come and take it,” he snarls.

Unfortunately, the lightsaber knows his hand, but he doesn’t know how to use it.

**xv.**

Finn comes round several times before he’s conscious enough to wake up. He knows he misses a lot of shit, and a lot gets explained to him, slowly, several times, in simple words. Even more is left unsaid. He can tell that much from the brush of Rey’s lips on his forehead, the press of Poe’s hand on his shoulder, _just rest, buddy, just rest_. BB-8 beeps at him, and Han Solo peers down at him, _we invalids gotta stick together, right, Chewie?_ And Finn sleeps through most of it, and retains only snatches.

His dreams are still unruly. There’s a little boy in a desert and a red-haired man in a city, and a laughing Togruta with twin lightsabers, men and women in orange flightsuits and a dark-haired princess in white, and the Eldest Brothers, who had all the same faces and died before Finn was born. There’s a woman in a blue gown with pale flowers in her hands, and she says _sweetheart, you are not like me, you are only sleeping; heal and wake_ , and a man saying _trust the Force, Anakin_. And a man with one metal hand and an astromech - no, two men with metal hands, and the same astromech; they are different, and Finn knows they are different, but he doesn’t know how he knows them apart.

He struggles into wakefulness and peers up at Leia Organa and croaks: “I never met any of these people in my life.”

“They gave you too much dihypranide, I think,” Leia Organa says, peering at him over the top of her datapad. It makes about as much sense as anything else, so Finn goes back to sleep.

He wakes again for real about an hour later, and when the doctors and nurses are done poking and prodding and he’s being permitted to pick slowly at some kind of protein shake mix that his stomach should tolerate, General Organa brings him up to speed.

“Rey has gone to fetch Luke,” she says, laying her datapad on her lap. “She was extremely angry on your behalf. I thought she should do something constructive with that.” 

“Angry?” Finn says. His voice is getting stronger and easier, slowly. Tiny sips of water help. He has, apparently, been breathing for himself for days, and, apparently, that is a miracle. He is going to have massive scarring and he is not allowed to see any of it. “Because of Kylo Ren?”  
  
General Organa’s hesitation is visible, and so is her sadness. She folds her hands over her datapad, and for the first time Finn notices a ring; a twisted, simple thing of gold, and two round purple stones. She wasn’t wearing it before.

“Let me tell you about my brother,” she says, and in fits and starts - for Finn is tired, and can’t stay waking long - she tells the story of a man broken by the wreck of his life’s purpose, by the loss of his nephew, by the loss of his son. A man who chose to remove himself from the galaxy, in grief and despair. 

By the time she gets to the bit where Luke Skywalker runs away from everything that’s his responsibility, Finn has figured it out. Maz Kanata told him, after all.

“I guess running away runs in the family,” Finn says bitterly, when she’s done.

“Then you didn’t inherit it,” Leia says drily. “Most people wouldn’t describe a daring suicide mission on a superweapon as _running away_.”

“I did that for Rey.”

  
  
“There are much worse reasons.”

  
There’s a long pause, in which Finn drifts off and drifts back again. Leia doesn’t go anywhere, so when he blinks his eyes open again he says: “What’s my real name?”

  
“Anakin,” Leia says. “Anakin Starros. Your mother gave you her surname.”

_Anakin_. He turns the name over in his mind and it rings true.

Another long pause. “You know, I think it’s a Jedi thing. The tendency to retreat into hermitage and stay there, just because the world came down around your ears _once_.” Leia sighs, and switches her datapad back on. “Just make sure Rey leaves a forwarding address. She might be even better at getting herself lost than Luke.” 

“Huh,” Finn says, and fights sleep long enough to say: “I have the Force, right?”  
  


“Yes.”

  
“Can you have the Force and _not_ be a Jedi?”

“I’ve managed it for more than fifty years.”

“Will you teach me?”

“Anything you like,” says his aunt. “When you’re better. So go to sleep.”

He shuts his eyes, because he is not arguing with that tone of voice any time soon. She must think he’s asleep, because after a few minutes she gets up and ghosts a kiss over his forehead, and it feels not just like touch but like warmth, and the smell of a kind of spiced hot chocolate he doesn’t recall, and jungle chatter, and busy political corridors. 

_I’m a person_ , he remembers, _and my name is Anakin._

_Finally_ , an echo replies, and it’s both the boy in the desert and a man with a metal hand.

“You shut up,” Finn murmurs in his sleep. “I’ll figure it out myself.”


End file.
